PEOPLE! I FORGOT SOMETHING IMPORTANT!
The population of the druids!
Tis 60,000!
There, out of the way :P
Oh, and i have a new technology that i will explain now
Central Intelligence- CIs are an in-between of true AIs and VIs, designed for ships with the possibility of rising to sentience. They're platforms are generally like that holographic table in old world blues, the one in the high tech apartment-
Warships- A cross between a cruiser and a frigate, these make up the majority of the Imperial fleet. Every time i mentioned frigates last chapter replace it with warship :P
Archimedes Defense Platform (ADP)- This defense platform, essentially a copy of the original Archimedes 2.0, is the last line of defense for an imperial planet. Their giant lasers can rip through dreadnoughts, but they have a cool-down time of 30 minutes, and this makes them pretty much a one hit wonder except for in a long and prolonged battle, luckily they had a system of honeycombed forcefields which allows them to take many hits.
There are currently nine in orbit of earth, three in orbit of mars, and one in orbit of both Europa and Io respectively. Pluto has two because of it being so close to the relay.
Oh, and finally, I apologize at my lie last chapter, apparently less than a week means half a month to me :P
Captain Sarah sighed as she monitored her ships positioning alongside the Mining station. The ship's CI simplifying everything for her needs.
She didn't know why they had to have a Warship go with the exploratory group every time they opened a new relay, but she guessed that the Empress was just being cautious. Two alien races have already been confirmed to exist, no reason not to expect another one, most likely hostile.
"Ma'am, sending activation codes in 30 seconds." The CI Spoke this as a holographic timer appeared above it and the seconds ticked down. Sarah had a visual brought up and got ready for the best part of the babysitting job.
Just as the codes were sent the massive tuning fork shaped structure seemed to explode with blue energy in it's core as it powered up. The concentric rings started spinning and Greed's Delight started moving towards the relay. But suddenly a blue beam tore the vessel to shreds. The fifty or so workers of the massive machine didn't even have a single warning.
The CI spoke again, rapidly because of the situation as he brought up various images around the ship.
"Ma'am! An extraordinarily powerful mass effected slug has destroyed Greed's Delight! Extrapolating point of origin... seven hundred kilometers away from us at 7 O'clock, direct course. Bringing up magnified visual." Sarah quickly glanced over the image and the respective data. It looked to be seven vessels. One was around half a kilometer in length while the rest were half Warship sized. The half kilometer sized one had a rather powerful looking mass effect rail gun. But it differed in design from Rapturian tech with a much thinner barrel.
Before she could react, another round destroyed the mining station, and a dozen more people died.
Surging into action, Sarah tapped on the physical keyboard sending orders throughout the ship as the microphone activated.
"We are under attack! Prepare Tesla cannons! Fire all lasers in line of sight towards all bogeys immediately! Prep the Sun-Spore just in case and send an alert back to Shanxi. Order the science vessel to take cover behind us until they can spool up their drives and prepare ours too." With a note of finality her crew started performing their duties as best they could.
Then the entire ship shook as a round from the biggest ship got a direct hit, knocking out their first layer of shields in an instant.
'I just hope we can hold out long enough for the colony to get the message...'
6 minutes earlier, 5.5 minutes before relay activation.
Shipmaster Agrius glared at his communications officer, unbelieving of this.
This was just supposed to be a nice and simple, and boring, routine border patrol. Nothing like this was supposed to happen to him, nothing so big as this.
A first contact scenario.
"Spirits help me" Agrius stared at the screen for a few minutes observing the alien ships approaching the Relay. They were strange constructions indeed. One, the smallest, looked like some jacked up missile, like many early spacecraft of various species. But it had many antennae and sensors suggesting it was some form of science vessel. Plus it was shaped a bit differently appearing more like a proper ship.
The rather larger one, the only military ship from what he could tell, was shaped sort of like a sideways wheel. The band between the upper and lower discs were brimmed with weapons of unknown make, and what appeared to be an axial railgun from the two forward arms he could see. Definitely not mass accelerators as no element zero was detected on the ship, which was strange considering the other two had them. Curious. It was also between the size of a cruiser and a frigate.
The third and second largest ship confused him. It was large, almost 500 meters long and had a metal dome on one end, but what looked to be hundreds of movable arms. It almost resembled the sea-life of some planets (Jelly Fish).
And finally, a kilometer long vessel that definitely wasn't a warship, it appeared to be mostly hollow and more of a brick than anything else, with simple fusion torch thrusters and a green paint job.
Agrius pushed these thoughts away as he looked on in horror as this dumb, ignorant , STUPID race started sending signals to the relay and before he could even press a button it activated in the quickest activation sequence he had ever heard of. Agrius threw away his thoughts of sending the first contact package and activated ship-wide comms.
"Fire at those ships immediately!" Agrius watched in grim satisfaction as the largest ship was destroyed. Although he almost laughed as the science vessel hid behind the military ship. It didn't even have shields to protect it! The next to go was the domed ship, it proving to have minimal shields
But that humor turned to shock as the next round fired seemed to impact a white barrier a few meters from the hull. And then he was shocked more as lasers hit his cruiser, bypassing the barriers completely and tearing out a chunk ,hitting their water storage causing super-heated vapor to blow out of the ship and immediately turn into an, admittedly, beautiful array of tiny ice crystal clouds that made the light shine.
Agrius opened a channel to all his ships.
"Fire all weapons!"
Sarah's ship quickly moved into shield formation, using it's large expansive top to work as a literal shield for the science vessel. But soon the normal three layers of shields were dissipated one by one, until the final layer gave out and the slugs started making shock-waves run through the ship, shaking the computers and hardware almost out of their fittings.
Finally the science vessel reported that it's drive was ready to go and they warped back towards Shanxi to warn the mining colony in case the message didn't come through somehow.
But before they could leave Sarah saw something that made her heart clench.
The alien rounds had pierced the warp drive.
They couldn't go FTL, and they could never hope to escape by normal speeds so they had to stay.
So, with dread in her heart, she activated their single Sun-Spore.
"Everyone, our warp drive is destroyed, we cannot leave. But now that we are backed up against a wall, are we going to go out quietly?" There was silence as her crew across the ship let that sink in until one man stood up.
"No, we cannot go quietly otherwise they will torture us for information and steal the Empire's technology." Similar sentiments spread throughout the ship and Sarah nodded grimly.
"Fine then. Helm! Set us to the emergency level speed. Prep the sun-spore." Various ayes resounded throughout the room and everyone did their grim work as they charged at the alien vessels.
But the aliens appeared to understand their intentions and the ships began to fire ever quicker. Giant chunks of armor and hull and frame were ripped off the ship until the imperial warship wasn't even flying properly any more, they were going ballistic and spinning like and asteroid until finally, they were a hundred meters from the largest ship.
The massive missile, more like rocket, in their hold suddenly made a beep, and the void lit up like a new star was born, for a minute, a bright yellow tiny sun stood their before expanding far enough that it became simple hot gasses flying through space
Agrius looked on in morbid respect as the alien ship endured. Even without it's shields and several punctures through the ship it still functioned.
But after the next hit went right through port towards the apparent rear of the ship, it's tactics changed immediately, apparently they hit something vital. Soon the power readings went off the scale and his officers reported Radiological alarms.
Then it started moving quicker than most Salarian vessels towards them in a suicide run. Agrius's eyes widened in horror.
"Fire all weapons at that ship, burn out the guns if you have to just make sure they do not get in range!" But it was all for not as the ship came dangerously close to his and suddenly his world ended in a flash of searing pain.
The science vessel stopped it's warp drive above Shanxi and began using it's radio to broadcast the emergency signal after confirming that the QEC message hadn't gotten through somehow.
When the radio broadcast made it through Shanxi's atmosphere mass confusion and partial chaos ensued. Luckily the colony was tiny like most Imperial ones and so it only took one passenger ship to evacuate the citizens.
The planetary colony was created for the sole purpose of strip mining iron, aluminum, titanium, and anything else worth any value. So while it was a valuable resource of the empire it wasn't quite worth defending as much as one of the Sol colonies.
But the Empress, once she got word all the way back in Rapture proper, had decided to put up a strong front to the aliens so that they wouldn't think that the Empire was weak. All technology on the surface had been either extracted or destroyed, and every captain had orders to commit a self destruct if they thought they were to be captured.
ETA was about three days if the Charles Darwin was prepared to burn out it's thrusters (As it was on the far side of the empire doing drills), but the fifty warships now protecting the colony should be enough til then.
If there was a strong enough force, they would retreat to Arcturus station. There they would mount a proper defense if the aliens brought reinforcements.
almost three days later
Desolus took a deep breath, then let it out to calm himself. The signal from the patrol group had been taken seriously right away, and the hastily formed pacification fleet had been sent so that they could overtake a colony before the aliens could mount a proper defense. A quick glare at the holo-map showed him that they were almost to the next system in range of the now activated relay.
"Ok then, time to begin" He stared at the tactical display, then gave his order.
"Commence FTL ttravel." The ships entered FTL in a blue blur for a several hours and eventually arrived next to the relay 314. Soon after though he lost contact with two ships.
"What happened! Report now!" A sensor's offcer looked up nervously.
The Unyielding Tower and Courage over Honor were just destroyed with a single nuclear device. The sensors read at least 100 megatons sir, two large missiles are making their way here, they are causing a radiological alarm and I expect they will have the same magnitude. Also there are several ships that have been damaged by the explosion" Desolus clenched his mandibles in frustration, that was a good half thousand turians dead.
"Locate attackers and engage! Release fighters. Send a few tracking missiles at those nukes and if they get into any sort of range burn out the GARDIAN lasers if you have too, I don't want any more ships nuked!" The bridge erupted into action as they relayed his orders.
The Turian Dreadnought fired at the lead Warship and destroyed it after four hits, the triple layered shielding failing under the rapidly firing and powerful railguns. Luckily the way Imperial shields were made, no matter how much power an attack has it will only take out one layer (unless it completely overwhelms the system).
The Imperial vessels released countermeasures in the form of a cloud of hot plasma which, while very temporary, would give the ships time to reposition themselves.
After the Imperial vessels had repositioned and the plasma cooled into gasses, they fired their tesla cannons. Soon after some of the ship's commanders realized that their attacks were only being slowed down by a minimal amount, they relayed the fact that the Turians must be using kinetic barriers and the Imperial tactics shifted suddenly from defensive to offensive, now that they knew they had the advantage.
Vice Admiral Saito frowned at the firepower of the enemy's main guns. They would have to get this done rather quick.
Before he could consult more data though, an emergency message popped up on his holographic display, pressing the button to open it he quickly read the memo and smirked to himself.
Activating the fleet-wide intercoms, he tapped the microphone to test if the message was playing, nodding to himself, he spoke.
"Attention all remaining ships with Sun-Spores in storage, set them to fire while providing a safety blanket of laser fire. Da Vinci get your main tesla cannon lined up and fire at the engines of the lead ship." Saito watched grimly as another of his ships' nukes were launched, but most were cut down, one made it through and killed another of the enemy vessels. That made it a 8 to 9 battle in their favor but of course they only had Warships while the aliens had that kilometer sized vessel and several ships between it's size and a warship. And it was managing to survive the tesla and laser fire even with it's thin armor. The size of the damn thing kept it relatively safe.
If only they had a Archimedes platform, they could destroy the vessel in one hit.
But thinking on that gave him an idea, he restored fleet-wide.
"All ships! Fire main tesla cannons in synchronization with my ship. And concentrate all non point-defense secondaries at the kilometer long vessel. We'll take that bastard down the hard way." Confirmation came through and the ships fired, the realm of space was light up with nine giant tesla beams and laser fire. The dreadnought crumpled and melted at the concentrated fire and one unlucky frigate that was too close was struck by excess lightning and most of the systems were short-circuited, as evidenced by the lights going out.
The return fire though crippled two of his own ships and destroyed another, but before he could order another round of attacks a video link opened up in front of him .
The empress looked at him with an amused expression, but he could see the underlying anger well.
"Good day Vice Admiral, how would you like me to deal with your little problem, they did harm my children, after all." Saito grinned and nodded.
Of to the side closer towards the planet, space distorted in a massive way and the HMSV Charles Darwin, in all it's glory, came out of warp speed and immediately had tesla beams firing at the rest of the alien cruisers as the Imperial Warships recharged their tesla cannons. Finally, after three cruisers were taken out by the Darwin's Main deathray while two more were destroyed by the secondary two deathrays respectively, the remaining one somewhat battered cruiser and dozen or so frigate began a retreat.
Eleanor, the person currently commanding the Charles Darwin, frowned at the retreating ships. Surely they must have a larger ship like hers in reserve, the only reason for only having one super-dreadnought was the lack of resources on Earth, the extrasolar mining camps were providing an extremely lucrative amount of resources. So if these aliens had enough resources to afford having such large ships than they must be trying to receive reinforcements.
Deciding on a course of action, she made sure they couldn't report on what they saw.
The deathrays needed a few minutes to recharge so she had ten Sun-Spores fire at the ships (That's a paltry amount for this vessel). They activated in the appropriate range and killed most of the frigates, but the cruiser had been just out of range.
The now heavily damaged, almost cripple, cruiser was missing one of those strange wings and several of the glowing spots that must be engines were dim, but it managed to cover itself in a blue shroud and disappear in a streak of blue. Looking at the sensors Eleanor looked surprised at the results.
"So they even use Eezo for FTL, interesting..."
Saito cheered along with his crew after the last cruiser was gone and a complete victory achieved. Now that the Charles Darwin was here they could reassemble at the core worlds as the various extra-solar colonies evacuated to actual sustainable colonies closer to Sol for better protection. The three small extrasolar colonies would be much easier to protect and worth protecting.
Looking out towards the Charles Darwin, Saito felt confident they could succeed with this ship on their side. And the Empress of course.
Few days later
Eleanor grimaced at the quickly made plans, if resources weren't being funneled into the last two super-dreadnoughts then they would only have the Charles Darwin to rely on. But she guessed that they had enough to finish them if she denied several independent contractors the resources they were being given at the moment, she would have to repay them with money to appease them.
But now the Imperial vessels were returning home, and she needed to be prepared to make a few speeches for her people.
Ok, I hope you liked this style I'm trying out now that we've gotten to part 2. Tell me how I did because It's been a while... (For the record, I don't like this chapter, there's just something... missing, hmm...)
I had intended for this chapter to be shorter (And quicker) to test out this style i'll be using for the rest of the story, unfortunately that didn't quite work out now did it? Well, at least it wasn't more than a month, only half one this time (SUCH IMPROVEMENT!)